Top 100 Art Is Bad Quotes
#1. Art is bad when 'you see the intent and get put off.' (Goethe) In Tolstoy one is unaware of the intent, and sees only the thing itself.
from the book, On Retranslating A Russian Classic Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Joel Carmichael
#2. All art is bad, but modern art is the worst.
Joyce Cary
#3. For good-intentioned people making decisions, there's no such thing as a bad choice. So it doesn't matter what you choose. Choose something, then deliberately line up with the choice you make. This is the art of alignment and allowing. (paraphrased)
Abraham Hicks
#4. To call a work of art Kitsch is to condemn it for being bad art. But there is a great deal of bad art that we do not condemn as Kitsch. To condemn something as Kitsch is to condemn it on moral grounds.
Karsten Harries
#5. When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.
Marc Chagall
#6. We ... believe that art is religious, because it is one of man's highest aspirations. There is no such thing as pagan art, only good and bad art.
Irving Stone
#7. Art should be beautiful, not ugly. It should be uplifting and redemptive. Art reassures us that life is good and that, however bad things may look at the moment, everything works out for the best in the end.
Michael Swanwick
#8. It is in the nature of original contemporary art to present itself as a bad risk. And we the public ... should be proud of being in this predicament, because nothing else would seem to us quite true to life; and art, after all, is supposed to be a mirror of life.
Leo Steinberg
#9. You cannot explain me with "isms." They are very bad for an artist. What one must believe in is color.
Marc Chagall
#10. All bad art is the result of good intentions.
Oscar Wilde
#11. The dirty secret of art is you don't have to show people your bad writing. That's what we have the delete key for.
Robert McKee
#12. No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph ... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.
David Wojnarowicz
#13. There's not much high and low culture any more: there's just mingling streams of art and what matters is whether it's good art or bad art.
Neil Gaiman
#14. Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.
Jerry Saltz
#15. I really don't know what's good or bad art because all the art I like people tell me is tasteless.
Ed Sheeran
#16. Too much thought is bad for the soul, for art, and for crime. It is also a sign of middle age.
Patrick Hamilton
#17. Good or bad, the one thing I can say about my art is, if I can quote Sinatra, I did it my way.
Frank Frazetta
#18. Artists are free to push boundaries to make art. But when pushing boundaries is their only aim, the result is usually bad art.
Jane Lynch
#19. As for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of ... In literature, as in allthings, there is only the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false.
Victor Hugo
#20. In art there is no absolute good or bad, but it is absolute that there is good and bad.
Walter Darby Bannard
#21. Most human beings are, unfortunately, ugly enough without putting glasses upon them, and to disfigure any of the really beautiful faces that we have with such contrivances is surely as bad as putting an import tax upon art. As for putting glasses upon a child it is enough to make the angels weep.
William H. Bates
#22. Music is a permanent art, it will always go through phases where you like it and are in tune with it, but saying that music "got bad" is infantile. The same is true with your life.
John Darnielle
#23. Art is a way to express yourself and through that you can escape a bad situation.
Russell Simmons
#24. I know from my own experience that great films and great actors can have a really big influence on you. There is a place for art in the world, and if you're lucky enough to be good at something and to keep being given work, it's not such a bad thing.
Sally Hawkins
#25. There is no such thing as an amateur artist as different from a professional artist. There is only good art and bad art.
Paul Cezanne
#26. There's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is popular or unpopular. What is banned in Boston may be bid on at Christie's.
Ron Brackin
#27. You have to be ahead of your game, and in industry that is a different condition than in art. If you make things in an intelligent way and then they are replicated, that's a beautiful thing. If you make things in a bad way and they are replicated, the wrong is multiplied.
Ross Lovegrove
#28. The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a mother must have her children believe she has never engaged in sex, never made a bad decision, never caused her own mother a moment's anxiety, and was never a child.
Erma Bombeck
#29. It's not words, but years we should be editing. Remember: time spent on bad art is a form of redundancy, doing the same thing twice is a form of tautology, and wasting precious moments complaining about life is a form of pleonasm. We should all learn to live our lives concisely.
Anthony Marais
#31. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.
Susan Sontag
#32. Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.
Oscar Wilde
#33. A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
Paul Valery
#34. The bad teacher imposes his ideas and his methods on his pupils, and such originality as they may have is lost in the second-rate art of imitation.
Stephen Neill
#35. I think all art is subjective - that whoever's watching it or listening to it will decide whether it's good or bad.
Billy Boyd
#36. I'm always right, always wrong. Dressing bad's like loving you there is nothing i haven't worn. Nothing, I haven't said before. You are nothing I haven't felt before.
Tegan Quin
#37. What is bad for the heart is good for art. The terrible irony of our lives as artists.
Jandy Nelson
#38. Children do have the potential to kill art. But now I think they kill the bad art. At least that is what my son has done for me.
Kevin Wilson
#39. Art stands in opposition to all the bad things that happen in life, which is where physicians stand. That's what doctors do-affirm life. And that's what artists do.
Eric Avery
#40. Money is not the root of all kinds of evil. The love of money is. It's also the root of a lot of bad art.
Michael Gungor
#41. Realism in so far as it means Reality to life is always bad art.
Sherwood Anderson
#42. This is the art of courage: to see things as they are and still believe that the victory lies not with those who avoid the bad, but those who taste, in living awareness, every drop of the good.
Victoria Lincoln
#43. The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
Jean Cocteau
#44. It's terribly wrong to stuff that sacred citadel with junk you know darn well is bad for you, I came to realize I was barreling pell-mell down the road leading to disease, disability and premature destruction of the most precious thing I could ever be given-my own life.
Ralph Maxwell
#45. Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be 'in on it'.
Ezra Pound
#46. The best of American television is thought-provoking, original, brilliant, exciting - from 'The Sopranos' on, whether it's 'The Wire' or 'Breaking Bad' or 'House of Cards,' they're fantastic pieces of art.
Martin Freeman
#47. Well, I'm not defining good and bad art, except, that art that appeals to me or repels me is good. Art that bores me is bad.
Lucien Carr
#48. Writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That 'art' is really 'artifact,' Exhibit A, Exhibit B, of something else: a person's whole experience and life. And that always there's the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out.
Chris Kraus
#49. If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.
Archibald MacLeish
#50. Good can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What's important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it's good or bad is beside the point. Make art.
Austin Kleon
#51. People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.
Minnie Maddern Fiske
#52. In my opinion, if you want to pursue an art, especially acting, you have to be really perceptive of what people go through. There is so much bad in the world, and I think that acting it out and exploring it almost helps you deal with it.
Rita Volk
#53. Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
Oscar Wilde
#54. People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.
George Bernard Shaw
#55. O how feeble is man's power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
Nor a lost hour recall!
But come bad chance,
And we join to'it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o'er us to'advance.
John Donne
#56. Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.
Chuck Jones
#57. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no
artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all,
and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.
Robert M. Pirsig
#58. There is something about seeing real people on a stage that makes a bad play more intimately, more personally offensive than any other art form.
Anatole Broyard
#59. I really think there's no difference between an art piece made by a man and one made by a woman. Is it a good art piece or a bad art piece? Of course, if you're female, you're maybe dealing with different issues.
Marina Abramovic
#60. If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.
Marcel Duchamp
#61. Art, we are told, is a criterion of one's taste. How humiliating, should our taste turn out to be bad. Rather as though we were caught stark naked with a poor figure.
Ilka Chase
#62. Art is for entertainment purposes, but it's also to reflect our dreams, our hopes, the present, the future the past - whether it's good or bad.
Amber Valletta
#63. No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.
Kenneth Clark
#64. I feel like Adele is a diva. Not in the bad way. She is one of the greatest voices of this industry and of her own art. What she offers is so unique that she's risen to such a status that very few artists can enjoy.
Xavier Dolan
#65. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#66. I see 30 to 40 gallery shows a week, and no matter what kind of mood I'm in, no matter how bad the art is, I almost always feel better afterward. I can learn as much from bad art as from good.
Jerry Saltz
#67. It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.
John Ruskin
#68. We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.
Billy Al Bengston
#69. Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice.
Ove Arup
#70. The existence of good bad literature - the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously - is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
George Orwell
#71. There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
Gustave Flaubert
#72. Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker
#73. We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?
Aldous Huxley
#74. Craft' gets a bad rap. Mediocre art is not caused by craft; it is caused by artists. Good art employs whatever craft works best.
Walter Darby Bannard
#75. In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people, ... [t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.:; 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.
George Orwell
#76. Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign
John Gardner
#77. Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.
Jerry Saltz
#78. Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint.
Arshile Gorky
#79. All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is no such thing as a non-religious subject. But much bad or downright sacrilegious art depicts so-called religious subjects.
Madeleine L'Engle
#80. The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.
E.F. Schumacher
#81. My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.
Peter Schjeldahl
#82. Our art is cynical and bad-ass and made by people who will not be happy until you join them in the church of "everything is fucked up, so throw up your hands." This is art as anesthesia.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#83. BE GRATEFUL EVEN for hardship, setbacks, and bad people. Dealing with such obstacles is an essential part of training in the Art of Peace.
Morihei Ueshiba
#84. I very much enjoyed Leo Tolstoy's What is Art? I can't quote it, it's been a while, but at the end of the day, the idea is that "art that does good in the world is art, and what doesn't is not. It's propaganda or something else. It's bad."
Scott Avett
#85. Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life.
Rebecca West
#86. Just letting it out is one of the definitions of bad art.
Dennis Potter
#87. What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.
Marcel Duchamp
#88. Among the planets of the arts, architecture is the dark side of the moon.
Bruno Zevi
#89. A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.
Muriel Rukeyser
#90. Explaining the unknown should be left to science, questions of good and bad behavior can be answered by ethics, and inspiration is often found in the arts. There's no longer a need for the social construct of religion.
David G. McAfee
#91. When you are 'bad' in the art world they are very very scared! They want to control you ... and they can't! Individuality and uniqueness are threats to the status quo. It is an artist's job to be an 'outlaw.
Laurence Gartel
#92. Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good: for which reason a common and by no means a bad description of the Chief Good is, that which all things aim at.
Aristotle.
#93. It is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#94. Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide and has many marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm that possesses: my life as an artist depends on him.
Oscar Wilde
#95. Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art
although it may possibly be very good journalism?
Sherwood Anderson
#96. For artists it's a lot easier to make art in bad times than it is in good times. When you've got no money it's easy to just drink your way through it and make great art. But if you're making lots of money it can be very problematic.
Damien Hirst
#97. We're supposed to strive for harmony, and that's what the art of tea is supposed to accomplish ... but harmony is very, very difficult to achieve in this country. Tea ceremony is powerless. But it's also not such a bad thing either. You should enjoy it while you can.
Koushun Takami
#98. People sometimes complain that Berliners just sit around all day in cafes, smoking and talking about art. Is that supposed to be a bad thing?
Joe Jackson
#99. An artist who maintains that he has been misunderstood is almost always a bad artist who, I'm afraid to say, has been understood.
Jo Nesbo
#100. I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.
Chaim Potok
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